My Literary Breakup
Notes on the end of a fifteen-year friendship.
JUNE 20, 2023
The writer Elisabeth Åsbrink was friends with the controversial Swedish playwright Lars Norén for 15 years. One day he suddenly declared that the friendship was over. It meant that she went from being loved in the first three volumes of his published diaries to being loathed in the final two. Here, Åsbrink writes about their complicated relationship.
Norén died in January 2021 from complications owing to COVID-19, three months after this essay was originally written.
“I now have to say something that pains me a great deal,” Lars Norén told me. It was Aug. 30, 2015, a hot and dusty summer day in Stockholm. We hadn’t seen each other all year, our communication had been limited to sporadic text messages. But finally, we had arranged a time to meet for a cup of coffee.
“We can’t be friends anymore,” he said.
“No?” I asked, surprised. I had always sensed that our acquaintance could suddenly end — and that one day it inevitably would. Still, I was unprepared.
“How come?” I asked.
“Because of Dagens Nyheter and its stance on the NATO issue,” he answered. “I cannot accept it.”
I took a moment to let his words sink in. They didn’t make sense. Dagens Nyheter is the largest Swedish daily, and I sporadically wrote for its culture section. But I wasn’t employed by the paper, I didn’t even have a fixed contract. My primary work consisted of the solitary writing of books. Adding to that, NATO had been a relatively peripheral subject in Swedish public debate for the last two or three decades. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of the paper’s stance regarding NATO policy — my hunch was that it was vaguely positive (Dagens Nyheter was a liberal paper, after all).
Norén was a child of the European left and was almost reflexively anti-American. I also knew he disapproved of the newspaper after its theater critics and opinion leaders had heavily criticized his controversial 1999 play 7:3, in which he cast three prisoners who were still serving sentences. As far as NATO was concerned, the two of us had never discussed the topic.
“Dagens Nyheter’s stance on the NATO issue?” I repeated, stupidly.
“Yes,” said Lars.
“Might you be interested in my stance on the NATO issue?” I asked, a feeble attempt to object.
“It’s not relevant,” he interrupted. “By writing for that paper, you legitimize their stance. Therefore, our friendship must end here and now. As I said, this pains me a lot.”
That was the last time we spoke.
Being friends with a genius isn’t always easy. Sometimes you are loved, as Norén loved me until that coffee date on August 30, 2015. Sometimes you are loathed, as he came to loathe me in the years that followed. I’m fine with that. But reading his version of the story prompted me to describe the encounter in my own words.
Since then, I have turned this conversation into a good story to share over a glass of wine. I have told and retold it, shaken my head at the memory, laughed a bit and moved on with my life. But in 2020, the fourth part of Norén’s Diary of a Playwright was published in Sweden. In it, the story of our breakup is told from his perspective. He calls me a hypocrite, a careerist, a newspaper gossip, and even describes how he became nauseated after glimpsing me on the street in Stockholm (the sight must have been terrible). Some details of our meeting had been added to his account, others subtracted — there is nothing strange in that. We often remember only what we wish to remember and forget what we yearn to forget. Being friends with a genius isn’t always easy. Sometimes you are loved, as Norén loved me until that coffee date on August 30, 2015. Sometimes you are loathed, as he came to loathe me in the years that followed. I’m fine with that. But reading his version of the story prompted me to describe the encounter in my own words.
At his core, Norén was a poet. Living with the particular sensitivities needed for poetry to take form came at a high price. “The poems ate my face,” he would say. As a playwright, he was famous in Scandinavia, Germany, France and the U.S. He was first praised for his portrayals of the middle-class family, and for neurotically dealing with sex and death; then he was widely celebrated for his groundbreaking plays centered around the stories of outcasts, prostitutes and heroin addicts. Like a Giacometti of the Swedish language, he focused on scraping off layer after layer of words in order to reach the skeleton of existence. He could be tender as well as mean, funny as well as naive, and never stopped perceiving himself as an underdog.
Norén was a “genius” in the dictionary sense of the word. He could break open new spaces in your mind with a single sentence. When he took up writing fiction with the release of Diary of a Playwright in 2008, he anticipated the Karl Ove Knausgård way of describing reality — detailed, blunt, verbose — creating a body of text that appears to include everything, high and low, in an act of godlike creation. (The lows, in Norén’s case, often consisted of backstabbing people he had once called friends or those who had openly questioned parts of his work. I was not the only one he turned on.)
Once he had left a place, he wouldn’t return. This also applied to his friends.
Reading these men’s multi-thousand-page self-descriptive projects, I feel admiration mixed with disgust. What drives them? Is it that, beyond words, the writers doubt their own existence? Does the mass of text become an attempt to gather evidence to the contrary? I perceive above all an existential anxiety: If they do not capture even the smallest comma of life, then life has not been lived. With Knausgård, I’ve only had a quick smoke. I was friends with Norén on and off for 15 years.
You can call me a lot of things, but I was never blind. Just from the way he organized our meetings, I understood that he viewed both objects and people as interchangeable, replaceable. He would make a particular place his regular café, and then suddenly abandon it. Maybe something had changed, or maybe nothing had changed: His reasons varied. But once he had left a place, he wouldn’t return. This also applied to his friends.
Our meetings always seemed a little unreal to me, as if disconnected from the rest of my life, but I cherished the anomaly. His face was sphinxlike and his talk full of literary references. I used to look at him across a café table and try to make up my mind if I was dealing with the man or the myth, never quite sure what the conclusion would be. It was as if we met in the gap between his private and professional life, a no man’s land of social context that had a strong vitalizing effect on me. I kept coming back. We talked about our work, poetry, children, places we had visited. And we gossiped. Lars loved gossip. Everything that had to do with my background, the violence and persecution in my family’s history, attracted his attention. Despite our differences in age, in cultural status and in financial circumstance, we each found something desirable in the other, something that propelled our so-called friendship along. Through my family story, he gained access to Jewish history and persecution, a subject he seemed obsessed with; I got access to the literary world I so longed to explore for myself. During the years of our friendship, I worked as a journalist for public service television. I was so afraid of failing as a writer that I didn’t even dare to try. But through conversations with Norén, I got a momentary sense of what it could be like to exist inside text itself, to live, write, eat and drink it, if only for one hour at a time. As you can see, I was not only a coward when it came to literature, but also a romantic.
He raised his hand in farewell and shouted the poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s words after me: “Go and write! Go and write!”
Some of our meetings were one-sided, consumed by his monologues about his preferred philosopher of the moment — Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger were his favorites. But other talks were simply astonishing. Once, during his Café Saturnus period, we discussed Theodor W. Adorno (whom I never really understood), and I introduced him to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben. When the time for our talk was up, he followed me out the door and stayed on the sidewalk as I left. As I turned to wave, I saw him, all dressed in black, his face illuminated by the gray spring light. He raised his hand in farewell and shouted the poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s words after me: “Go and write! Go and write!”
Before I met Norén, I covered the fallout from his scandalous play 7:3 as an investigative journalist. Two of the prisoners he had cast were so-called neo-Nazis, expressing hatred toward Jews and journalists as well as denying the Holocaust, and their appearance on stage caused anger as well as bewilderment. Not only were their characters named after themselves, they also seemed to speak out of their own authentic lives. Was this even theater, people wondered, or was it in fact reality dressed up as theater? Was it morally and artistically acceptable for a Nazi to be declaring his ideology in front of theatergoers who had paid for tickets and were expected to applaud? If they clapped their hands at the end, did that amount to accepting the Nazi statements?
The scandal turned into a nightmare. The day after the last show, May 28, 1999, one of the Nazi actors robbed a bank and subsequently participated in the murders of two police officers in the small village of Malexander. In an instant, the cultural debate was replaced with shock. The incident remains one of the most brutal crimes in Swedish history. Looking for someone to blame, the public eye landed upon the theater and the “genius” behind it all: Norén himself. As a journalist, I interviewed and eventually got close to almost every key figure in the story, except Norén, who avoided Swedish media.
But an opportunity to approach him presented itself when he was beginning to stage his play If This Is a Man, based on Primo Levi’s book about Auschwitz. I expressed my interest and appreciation of Levi to some press person and was, to my surprise, granted an interview on behalf of Swedish television.
We met for the first time in late fall 2000. I asked Norén: Why Levi, why the words of a concentration camp survivor at this moment, after the 7:3 scandal? Was he seeking atonement? He politely answered my questions about Levi but refused to discuss 7:3. He got up, demanded that the cameras be turned off and said he wanted to leave. After an angry discussion, he somehow agreed to continue the interview. I got to ask my questions about 7:3 and the interview was broadcast as scheduled. Afterward, he said he had watched the final piece and found it “beautiful.”
We briefly stayed in touch, and then suddenly, three years later, he called me. He had found Levi’s friend and fellow survivor from Monowitz, a satellite camp of the main Auschwitz-Birkenau compex. “Pikolo is alive! Do you want to come along and make a film about our meeting?” I was flattered by his question and immediately wanted to say yes, but also wondered what was behind Norén’s offer. Why did he wish to make this film? Why did he want me, specifically, to film it? Was there a question of guilt? Was he perhaps seeking a path to (a Jewish) forgiveness?
Our trip to Strasbourg went terribly. We hardly spoke. He seemed to regret the whole idea, avoided me and was generally in a bad mood. During our first interview with the French Auschwitz survivor Jean Samuel, 85 years old at the time, Norén asked for details of his time in the Monowitz camp. Monsieur Samuel patiently spoke of violence, starvation and humiliation as well as his own lost faith in God. Either there was God or there was Auschwitz, he said, “and I have experienced Auschwitz.”
Norén then declared that he felt a great sadness that he was not Jewish himself. I was standing with an extra camera in my hand in Monsieur Samuel’s living room and literally lost my balance out of embarrassment. (The wobble is visible in the footage.) The next day, I interviewed Norén and tried to understand what he had meant. He reiterated that he felt “great sadness” about being excluded. Excluded from what, I wondered.
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“There are things that I do not understand, cannot understand, because I do not belong to a people who have been persecuted for over 2,000 years,” he said. “This fills me with sadness.”
My resulting documentary, “Don’t Try to Understand,” was broadcast on national television in 2004 and attracted quite a lot of attention. But I continued to wonder about Norén, the man behind the words, his silence and his black hoodie.
We met again in 2008, after I decided to write my first book, Smärtpunkten (The hurting point), about 7:3 and the murders in Malexander. With my background in investigative journalism, I planned to explore if there had been a connection between the theatrical production and the murders — had one led to the other? At the beginning, Norén was completely against the idea. He didn’t want to open up old wounds, he said. He wondered aloud if I even had the ability to write a book, and I told him I didn’t know. But he agreed to be interviewed. We had many long conversations in his small apartment in the center of Stockholm over the next several months. The room became foggy from his many cigarettes. When I told him about the book’s subtitle — Lars Norén, the Play 7:3 and the Murders in Malexander — his then-wife protested. The title, she said, would forever associate him with the murders. Norén was clearsighted: He accepted that he already was inextricably associated with the killings. This is your work, he told me. He would not interfere.
Over our 15 years of conversations, we occasionally talked about our private lives, children and divorces. Prior to the publication of his third diary, in 2013, I received printouts of the quotes he wanted to attribute to me. I was frustrated, not because he was untruthful but because he wrote about the man I had recently left and about my children. He had never met my ex-husband and knew nothing about my sons. Of course, I was the one who had told him everything, but only in conversations where he had also shared private information with me — the kind of thing friends do. I felt like an idiot. We engaged in a protracted battle as I fought to get him to cut everything connected to my ex and my children. Norén was resentful; I was infuriated. Our interactions petered out, and soon we were barely speaking at all. But then, in August 2015, we met again in Kaffeverket, an arty café — his choice, of course — and dived right into conversation about the book I was working on at the time, 1947: Where Now Begins, which deals with the passage of time and history. Norén spontaneously quoted a poem by Paul Celan — “In the rivers north of the future / I cast the net, which you / hesitantly weight / with shadows stones / wrote” — without knowing that I had already chosen it for the book’s epigraph. I was euphoric that he understood what I had been trying to achieve. Despite our past conflicts, in an instant I realized that I had kept in touch with him only to experience minutes like this. Then he declared the end of our friendship.
The breakup was slightly humiliating, even though it was from a friendship based on mixed emotions. But ultimately I ended up feeling relief. The anomaly was over and so was our mutual ambivalence.
“Do you mean I have to choose between you and Dagens Nyheter?” I asked with a smile, as if he were joking.
“Unfortunately,” he replied.
I realized he was serious. My fake smile faded, I quickly gathered my things, dramatically got up from my chair, scraping it against the raw concrete floor. I heard myself say, “Tack och hej, leverpastej” in Swedish, which literally means “See you later, liver pâté” and is roughly equivalent to “See you later, alligator.” I hadn’t used the phrase since my children were in the fourth grade, but it somehow seemed to be the only appropriate response, as from one 10-year-old to another. Then I left. After 50 meters I stopped to send a text — it’s still in my phone. I was hurt and chose my words with great care: “Your desire for purity is almost fascist.”
The breakup was slightly humiliating, even though it was from a friendship based on mixed emotions. But ultimately I ended up feeling relief. The anomaly was over and so was our mutual ambivalence. In spite of it all, I only wish to thank him. For his work, his writing: sharp-edged and vulnerable. He was undoubtedly an artistic genius. But as a friend, he was one hell of a disappointment.
This essay was originally published in Dagens Nyheter in November 2020. It has been translated and edited.